OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Immortal Tracker: Tracklet Never Dies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Previous online 3D Multi-Object Tracking(3DMOT) methods terminate a tracklet when it is not associated with new detections for a few frames. But if an object just goes dark, like being temporarily occluded by other objects or simply getting out of FOV, terminating a tracklet prematurely will result in an identity switch. We reveal that premature tracklet termination is the main cause of identity switches in modern 3DMOT systems. To address this, we propose Immortal Tracker, a simple tracking system that utilizes trajectory prediction to maintain tracklets for objects gone dark. We employ a simple Kalman filter for trajectory prediction and preserve the tracklet by prediction when the target is not visible. With this method, we can avoid 96% vehicle identity switches resulting from premature tracklet termination. Without any learned parameters, our method achieves a mismatch ratio at the 0.0001 level and competitive MOTA for the vehicle class on the Waymo Open Dataset test set. Our mismatch ratio is tens of times lower than any previously published method. Similar results are reported on nuScenes. We believe the proposed Immortal Tracker can offer a simple yet powerful solution for pushing the limit of 3DMOT. Our code is available at https://github.com/ImmortalTracker/ImmortalTracker.
Mask Transfiner for High-Quality Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Two-stage and query-based instance segmentation methods have achieved remarkable results. However, their segmented masks are still very coarse. In this paper, we present Mask Transfiner for high-quality and efficient instance segmentation. Instead of operating on regular dense tensors, our Mask Transfiner decomposes and represents the image regions as a quadtree. Our transformer-based approach only processes detected error-prone tree nodes and self-corrects their errors in parallel. While these sparse pixels only constitute a small proportion of the total number, they are critical to the final mask quality. This allows Mask Transfiner to predict highly accurate instance masks, at a low computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mask Transfiner outperforms current instance segmentation methods on three popular benchmarks, significantly improving both two-stage and query-based frameworks by a large margin of +3.0 mask AP on COCO and BDD100K, and +6.6 boundary AP on Cityscapes. Our code and trained models will be available at http://vis.xyz/pub/transfiner.
Speaker Embedding-aware Neural Diarization for Flexible Number of Speakers with Textual Information
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Overlapping speech diarization is always treated as a multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we reformulate this task as a single-label prediction problem by encoding the multi-speaker labels with power set. Specifically, we propose the speaker embedding-aware neural diarization (SEND) method, which predicts the power set encoded labels according to the similarities between speech features and given speaker embeddings. Our method is further extended and integrated with downstream tasks by utilizing the textual information, which has not been well studied in previous literature. The experimental results show that our method achieves lower diarization error rate than the target-speaker voice activity detection. When textual information is involved, the diarization errors can be further reduced. For the real meeting scenario, our method can achieve 34.11% relative improvement compared with the Bayesian hidden Markov model based clustering algorithm.
Dynamic Analysis of Nonlinear Civil Engineering Structures using Artificial Neural Network with Adaptive Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Dynamic analysis of structures subjected to earthquake excitation is a time-consuming process, particularly in the case of extremely small time step required, or in the presence of high geometric and material nonlinearity. Performing parametric studies in such cases is even more tedious. The advancement of computer graphics hardware in recent years enables efficient training of artificial neural networks that are well-known to be capable of learning highly nonlinear mappings. In this study, artificial neural networks are developed with adaptive training algorithms, which enables automatic nodes generation and layers addition. The hyperbolic tangent function is selected as the activation function. Stochastic Gradient Descent and Back Propagation algorithms are adopted to train the networks. The neural networks initiate with a small number of hidden layers and nodes. During training, the performance of the network is continuously tracked, and new nodes or layers are added to the hidden layers if the neural network reaches its capacity. At the end of the training process, the network with appropriate architecture is automatically formed. The performance of the networks has been validated for inelastic shear frames, as well as rocking structures, of which both are first built in finite element program for dynamic analysis to generate training data. Results have shown the developed networks can successfully predict the time-history response of the shear frame and the rock structure subjected to real ground motion records. The efficiency of the proposed neural networks is also examined, which shows the computational time can be reduced by 43% by the neural networks method than FE models. This indicates the trained networks can be utilized to generate rocking spectrums of structures more efficiently which demands a large number of time-history analyses.
Interpreting Machine Learning Models for Room Temperature Prediction in Non-domestic Buildings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

An ensuing challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the perceived difficulty in interpreting sophisticated machine learning models, whose ever-increasing complexity makes it hard for such models to be understood, trusted and thus accepted by human beings. The lack, if not complete absence, of interpretability for these so-called black-box models can lead to serious economic and ethical consequences, thereby hindering the development and deployment of AI in wider fields, particularly in those involving critical and regulatory applications. Yet, the building services industry is a highly-regulated domain requiring transparency and decision-making processes that can be understood and trusted by humans. To this end, the design and implementation of autonomous Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems for the automatic but concurrently interpretable optimisation of energy efficiency and room thermal comfort is of topical interest. This work therefore presents an interpretable machine learning model aimed at predicting room temperature in non-domestic buildings, for the purpose of optimising the use of the installed HVAC system. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed model can accurately forecast room temperatures eight hours ahead in real-time by taking into account historical RT information, as well as additional environmental and time-series features. In this paper, an enhanced feature engineering process is conducted based on the Exploratory Data Analysis results. Furthermore, beyond the commonly used Interpretable Machine Learning techniques, we propose a Permutation Feature-based Frequency Response Analysis (PF-FRA) method for quantifying the contributions of the different predictors in the frequency domain. Based on the generated reason codes, we find that the historical RT feature is the dominant factor that has most impact on the model prediction.
Unsupervised MKL in Multi-layer Kernel Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Kernel based Deep Learning using multi-layer kernel machines(MKMs) was proposed by Y.Cho and L.K. Saul in \cite{saul}. In MKMs they used only one kernel(arc-cosine kernel) at a layer for the kernel PCA-based feature extraction. We propose to use multiple kernels in each layer by taking a convex combination of many kernels following an unsupervised learning strategy. Empirical study is conducted on \textit{mnist-back-rand}, \textit{mnist-back-image} and \textit{mnist-rot-back-image} datasets generated by adding random noise in the image background of MNIST dataset. Experimental results indicate that using MKL in MKMs earns a better representation of the raw data and improves the classifier performance.
Document Layout Analysis with Aesthetic-Guided Image Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Document layout analysis (DLA) plays an important role in information extraction and document understanding. At present, document layout analysis has reached a milestone achievement, however, document layout analysis of non-Manhattan is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose an image layer modeling method to tackle this challenge. To measure the proposed image layer modeling method, we propose a manually-labeled non-Manhattan layout fine-grained segmentation dataset named FPD. As far as we know, FPD is the first manually-labeled non-Manhattan layout fine-grained segmentation dataset. To effectively extract fine-grained features of documents, we propose an edge embedding network named L-E^3Net. Experimental results prove that our proposed image layer modeling method can better deal with the fine-grained segmented document of the non-Manhattan layout.
GATER: Learning Grasp-Action-Target Embeddings and Relations for Task-Specific Grasping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Intelligent service robots require the ability to perform a variety of tasks in dynamic environments. Despite the significant progress in robotic grasping, it is still a challenge for robots to decide grasping position when given different tasks in unstructured real life environments. In order to overcome this challenge, creating a proper knowledge representation framework is the key. Unlike the previous work, in this paper, task is defined as a triplet including grasping tool, desired action and target object. Our proposed algorithm GATER (Grasp--Action--Target Embeddings and Relations) models the relationship among grasping tools--action--target objects in embedding space. To validate our method, a novel dataset is created for task-specific grasping. GATER is trained on the new dataset and achieve task-specific grasping inference with 94.6\% success rate. Finally, the effectiveness of GATER algorithm is tested on a real service robot platform. GATER algorithm has its potential in human behavior prediction and human-robot interaction.
Partner Personas Generation for Diverse Dialogue Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Incorporating personas information allows diverse and engaging responses in dialogue response generation. Unfortunately, prior works have primarily focused on self personas and have overlooked the value of partner personas. Moreover, in practical applications, the availability of ground truth partner personas is often not the case. This paper attempts to tackle these issues by offering a novel framework that leverages automatic partner personas generation to enhance the succeeding dialogue generation. We incorporate reinforcement learning with a dedicatedly designed critic network for reward judgement. Experimental results from both automatic and human evaluation demonstrate a) Our framework is capable of generating relevant, informative and coherent partner personas, even compared to the ground truth partner personas. b) Generated partner personas enhance the succeeding response generation, thus surpassing our baselines and comparison model when partner personas are missing during the inference stage. c) Our framework generates responses that are more informative and engaging than our baseline conditioned on the ground truth partner personas during inference. d) Our dedicatedly designed critic network reinforces our framework effectively. Finally, our framework gives better explainability and reduces the demands for external databases for partner personas.
Language models in word sense disambiguation for Polish
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In the paper, we test two different approaches to the {unsupervised} word sense disambiguation task for Polish. In both methods, we use neural language models to predict words similar to those being disambiguated and, on the basis of these words, we predict the partition of word senses in different ways. In the first method, we cluster selected similar words, while in the second, we cluster vectors representing their subsets. The evaluation was carried out on texts annotated with plWordNet senses and provided a relatively good result (F1=0.68 for all ambiguous words). The results are significantly better than those obtained for the neural model-based unsupervised method proposed in \cite{waw:myk:17:Sense} and are at the level of the supervised method presented there. The proposed method may be a way of solving word sense disambiguation problem for languages that lack sense annotated data.
Reconfiguration Problems on Submodular Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Reconfiguration problems require finding a step-by-step transformation between a pair of feasible solutions for a particular problem. The primary concern in Theoretical Computer Science has been revealing their computational complexity for classical problems. This paper presents an initial study on reconfiguration problems derived from a submodular function, which has more of a flavor of Data Mining. Our submodular reconfiguration problems request to find a solution sequence connecting two input solutions such that each solution has an objective value above a threshold in a submodular function $f: 2^{[n]} \to \mathbb{R}_+$ and is obtained from the previous one by applying a simple transformation rule. We formulate three reconfiguration problems: Monotone Submodular Reconfiguration (MSReco), which applies to influence maximization, and two versions of Unconstrained Submodular Reconfiguration (USReco), which apply to determinantal point processes. Our contributions are summarized as follows: 1. We prove that MSReco and USReco are both $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-complete. 2. We design a $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation algorithm for MSReco and a $\frac{1}{n}$-approximation algorithm for (one version of) USReco. 3. We devise inapproximability results that approximating the optimum value of MSReco within a $(1-\frac{1+ε}{n^2})$-factor is $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-hard, and we cannot find a $(\frac{5}{6}+ε)$-approximation for USReco. 4. We conduct numerical study on the reconfiguration version of influence maximization and determinantal point processes using real-world social network and movie rating data.
ORCHARD: A Benchmark For Measuring Systematic Generalization of Multi-Hierarchical Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The ability to reason with multiple hierarchical structures is an attractive and desirable property of sequential inductive biases for natural language processing. Do the state-of-the-art Transformers and LSTM architectures implicitly encode for these biases? To answer this, we propose ORCHARD, a diagnostic dataset for systematically evaluating hierarchical reasoning in state-of-the-art neural sequence models. While there have been prior evaluation frameworks such as ListOps or Logical Inference, our work presents a novel and more natural setting where our models learn to reason with multiple explicit hierarchical structures instead of only one, i.e., requiring the ability to do both long-term sequence memorizing, relational reasoning while reasoning with hierarchical structure. Consequently, backed by a set of rigorous experiments, we show that (1) Transformer and LSTM models surprisingly fail in systematic generalization, and (2) with increased references between hierarchies, Transformer performs no better than random.
Joint Sensing and Communication for Situational Awareness in Wireless THz Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Next-generation wireless systems are rapidly evolving from communication-only systems to multi-modal systems with integrated sensing and communications. In this paper a novel joint sensing and communication framework is proposed for enabling wireless extended reality (XR) at terahertz (THz) bands. To gather rich sensing information and a higher line-of-sight (LoS) availability, THz-operated reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) acting as base stations are deployed. The sensing parameters are extracted by leveraging THz's quasi-opticality and opportunistically utilizing uplink communication waveforms. This enables the use of the same waveform, spectrum, and hardware for both sensing and communication purposes. The environmental sensing parameters are then derived by exploiting the sparsity of THz channels via tensor decomposition. Hence, a high-resolution indoor mapping is derived so as to characterize the spatial availability of communications and the mobility of users. Simulation results show that in the proposed framework, the resolution and data rate of the overall system are positively correlated, thus allowing a joint optimization between these metrics with no tradeoffs. Results also show that the proposed framework improves the system reliability in static and mobile systems. In particular, the highest reliability gains of 10% in reliability are achieved in a walking speed mobile environment compared to communication only systems with beam tracking.
Towards Robust and Automatic Hyper-Parameter Tunning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The task of hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) is burdened with heavy computational costs due to the intractability of optimizing both a model's weights and its hyper-parameters simultaneously. In this work, we introduce a new class of HPO method and explore how the low-rank factorization of the convolutional weights of intermediate layers of a convolutional neural network can be used to define an analytical response surface for optimizing hyper-parameters, using only training data. We quantify how this surface behaves as a surrogate to model performance and can be solved using a trust-region search algorithm, which we call autoHyper. The algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art such as Bayesian Optimization and generalizes across model, optimizer, and dataset selection. Our code can be found at \url{https://github.com/MathieuTuli/autoHyper}.
A Comprehensive and Cross-Platform Test Suite for Memory Safety -- Towards an Open Framework for Testing Processor Hardware Supported Security Extensions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Memory safety remains a critical and widely violated property in reality. Numerous defense techniques have been proposed and developed but most of them are not applied or enabled by default in production-ready environment due to their substantial running cost. The situation might change in the near future because the hardware supported defenses against these attacks are finally beginning to be adopted by commercial processors, operating systems and compilers. We then face a question as there is currently no suitable test suite to measure the memory safety extensions supported on different processors. In fact, the issue is not constrained only for memory safety but all aspect of processor security. All of the existing test suites related to processor security lack some of the key properties, such as comprehensiveness, distinguishability and portability. As an initial step, we propose an expandable test framework for measuring the processor security and open source a memory safety test suite utilizing this framework. The framework is deliberately designed to be flexible so it can be gradually extended to all types of hardware supported security extensions in processors. The initial test suite for memory safety currently contains 160 test cases covering spatial and temporal safety of memory, memory access control, pointer integrity and control-flow integrity. Each type of vulnerabilities and their related defenses have been individually evaluated by one or more test cases. The test suite has been ported to three different instruction set architectures (ISAs) and experimented on six different platforms. We have also utilized the test suite to explore the security benefits of applying different sets of compiler flags available on the latest GNU GCC and LLVM compilers.
CHARTER: heatmap-based multi-type chart data extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The digital conversion of information stored in documents is a great source of knowledge. In contrast to the documents text, the conversion of the embedded documents graphics, such as charts and plots, has been much less explored. We present a method and a system for end-to-end conversion of document charts into machine readable tabular data format, which can be easily stored and analyzed in the digital domain. Our approach extracts and analyses charts along with their graphical elements and supporting structures such as legends, axes, titles, and captions. Our detection system is based on neural networks, trained solely on synthetic data, eliminating the limiting factor of data collection. As opposed to previous methods, which detect graphical elements using bounding-boxes, our networks feature auxiliary domain specific heatmaps prediction enabling the precise detection of pie charts, line and scatter plots which do not fit the rectangular bounding-box presumption. Qualitative and quantitative results show high robustness and precision, improving upon previous works on popular benchmarks
Context Matters in Semantically Controlled Language Generation for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This work combines information about the dialogue history encoded by pre-trained model with a meaning representation of the current system utterance to realize contextual language generation in task-oriented dialogues. We utilize the pre-trained multi-context ConveRT model for context representation in a model trained from scratch; and leverage the immediate preceding user utterance for context generation in a model adapted from the pre-trained GPT-2. Both experiments with the MultiWOZ dataset show that contextual information encoded by pre-trained model improves the performance of response generation both in automatic metrics and human evaluation. Our presented contextual generator enables higher variety of generated responses that fit better to the ongoing dialogue. Analysing the context size shows that longer context does not automatically lead to better performance, but the immediate preceding user utterance plays an essential role for contextual generation. In addition, we also propose a re-ranker for the GPT-based generation model. The experiments show that the response selected by the re-ranker has a significant improvement on automatic metrics.
Learning a Weight Map for Weakly-Supervised Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In the weakly supervised localization setting, supervision is given as an image-level label. We propose to employ an image classifier $f$ and to train a generative network $g$ that outputs, given the input image, a per-pixel weight map that indicates the location of the object within the image. Network $g$ is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between the output of the classifier $f$ on the original image and its output given the same image weighted by the output of $g$. The scheme requires a regularization term that ensures that $g$ does not provide a uniform weight, and an early stopping criterion in order to prevent $g$ from over-segmenting the image. Our results indicate that the method outperforms existing localization methods by a sizable margin on the challenging fine-grained classification datasets, as well as a generic image recognition dataset. Additionally, the obtained weight map is also state-of-the-art in weakly supervised segmentation in fine-grained categorization datasets.